Top donors, volunteers and organizers for President Barack Obama’s new nonprofit met Wednesday at a Washington hotel to discuss how the group can stay active and relevant in the president’s second term — but Obama and the group’s leader swears the effort is nonpartisan.

“I want to say a word about what we aren’t: We are not a partisan organization,” said Jon Carson, a former White House official who is now serving as the executive director of Organizing for Action.

“We are here to move this shared progressive agenda forward,” he added. “We will advocate to Democrats to move that agenda forward. We will advocate to Republicans. But issues are our focus.”

Obama is scheduled to speak Wednesday evening, but he told House Republicans at a closed-door meeting Wednesday afternoon on Capitol Hill that OFA is meant to address issues, not politics.

“OFA is organized around issues rather than 2014,” Obama said, according to a source in the room.

Obama said Democrats aren’t so savvy to always be thinking about the next election.

“We are not that smart,” Obama said. “We’re not thinking in those ways.”

But while the group has vowed to remain nonpartisan, the lineup of speakers featured a raft of former White House, campaign and administration officials — all Democratic partisans.

Former White House senior adviser David Plouffe, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and former campaign officials Ben LaBolt and Stephanie Cutter all were expected to address the roughly 70 donors and volunteers behind closed doors Wednesday afternoon.

Media access to the event is limited — reporters were allowed to attend a 30-minute session on Wednesday and are scheduled to an hour of access on Thursday. Obama’s speech is open only to White House pool reporters.

Carson, Plouffe and former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said that the organization would be powered by grass-roots advocacy — even as they made their pitch to a roomful of wealthy donors who helped fund much of Obama’s reelection effort.

Messina acknowledged that for both the big donors and the volunteers, Organizing for Action was against asking for more of their time and cash.

“We’ve asked far too much of your time, of your generosity” already, said Messina. But “we’re doing this because there’s a lot of people out there who are counting on us.”

Still, Messina said that the group’s grass-roots engagement remained at an all-time high. In the seven weeks since the nonprofit’s launch, Messina said that 1.1 million supporters had done something on behalf of OFA — from tweeting to hosting local meetups.

Top donors said the pitch from top OFA officials like Messina and Carson was that it would be a continuation of the president’s campaign apparatus.

“That is pretty overtly the purpose here to get people who supported the president to donate to the group supporting his agenda. It’s not surprising to me. It’s a natural continuation” of the campaign, said David desJardins, an Obama bundler who was invited but is not attending the summit.

So far, Organizing for Action has been mounting campaigns on the administration’s gun control push, as well as the automatically spending cuts that kicked in earlier this month. A recent email solicitation by the group warns that the budget sequester will have a real impact on children who depend on school funding. Another recent email told the story of a Minnesota student who lost his father to gun violence.

“Our role quite simply is to change the balance of power by being an organization — a network — of grass-roots strength,” Carson said.

“For every lobbying group that puts a dollar on the air tearing down the president’s agenda, an OFA volunteer will mobilize across the country to counter that,” Messina added.

The group has come under fire from government watchdogs and Republican critics, who say that it could be used as a vehicle to funnel unlimited corporate or union money into the president’s coffers. The group is not required by law to disclose any of its donors.

Responding to some of the criticism, OFA’s leaders announced last week that they would no longer accepted corporate dollars — and vowed to disclose donations quarterly.

Early reports suggested that top donors to the group would be rewarded with access to Obama — something that the White House and the nonprofit has strongly disputed.

“Any notion, as we’ve talked about, that there’s a price set for a meeting with the president is absurd and wrong,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Monday.

“He’ll speak to other outside organizations that have policy agendas. And that’s entirely appropriate. And the president is pursuing a policy agenda, as I noted earlier, that is inherently bipartisan, that is embraced by a majority of the American people both in general, as we saw in the election, and in the specifics,” Carney said about Obama’s role with the new nonprofit.

Still, the OFA is staffed by former White House and campaign insiders. It controls the president’s Twitter account — currently the fifth most-followed Twitter account on the planet with 28 million followers.